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It's time for the 2011 ACPA Annual Convention. Get ready to "Be More in Baltimore." Starting on Saturday, thousands of student affairs practitioners will come together to share ideas, make connections, discuss the upcoming consolidation vote, and engage in massive amounts of professional networking.The folks at ACPA have really ramped up their technology/communications efforts this year. Here's a rundown of this year's relevant techie bits:

As I've mentioned previously, I recently joined an online academic writing group. I was inspired by Kerry Ann Rockquemore's summer column and her advice that we use as many external motivators as possible. Although I've been quite productive over the past few years, there's one project that keeps getting placed on the back burner and thus has become my academic bête noir.

I have recently been awarded a small course development grant meant to use blogs in the teaching of European studies. I already had an idea about what I wanted to do: help students create and administer a web space where information about European politics, media, culture, and student life is presented in bilingual fashion (with posts in Swedish or English and in the foreign language of choice or in the mother tongue of students in the Bachelor and Master respectively).

People who work with information, folks like you and me, are constantly in danger of becoming obsessed with jobs that involve working with things. The reason I love chef books is that the job seems so tangible. You work with your hands and your brain to create something, a product that can be tasted.

When Google launched what Jeffrey Toobin called "Google's Moon Shot" - its audacious move to digitize the holdings of research libraries in order to make them searchable, Google argued that they were indexing books, not sharing copies of them, so it wasn't infringement. That argument never made it to court. As Toobin predicted in 2007, Google would settle out of court. And, as Patricia Schroeder, then president of the Association of American Publishers, told Toobin, it wouldn't be a settlement designed for the public good. “This is basically a business deal," she said.

I wonder if you, savvy readers of this blog, would “recognize” me if we met outside of cyberspace. By this, I don’t mean recognize me physically, of course – you probably have not seen my picture – I just mean that a personality can be quite different when channeled through a different format, and I might seem quite different than you imagine me. My daughter’s teacher said to me just a couple weeks ago that my daughter “becomes bold” in her writing.

This piece in the New York Times -- motto: No Paywall ‘til Monday! -- and this post by Tenured Radical got me thinking about office phones. The Times piece suggests that voice calls are going extinct, and TR suggests sacrificing office phones as a budget cut that wouldn’t really hurt, since they’re mostly vestigial anyway.Do you use your office phone?